Red Is The Colour
by Rainstorm Amaya Arianrhod
Summary: Once, Lianne’s favourite colour was red. Jon and Thayet’s middle daughter grows up.


**A/N:** This was pretty much written for Piercefic 08. _**Please read and review!**_

**Disclaimer:** TP owns Tortall.

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Red is Lianne's favourite colour.

Red means all kinds of things she likes. Red means blood, which makes everyone live, and that means healing, and Lianne loves her healer's lessons. Red means love, hatred, conflict like the songs and stories she loves to hear. Red means the soft red blanket Aunt Buri gave her when she was very small, and which she has adored to pieces ever since- the first time she ever mended something, it was a tear in the corner of that blanket, washed so many times its colour had faded. Red means the little ruby earrings her father gives her when she has her ears pierced. Red means the beautiful muslin ballgown her mother still keeps from years previously, the dress she was presented to Court in, that she still has the figure to wear and she shows Lianne, Kally and Vania every now and then. Red is the colour of the valiant, hardworking, mischievous Riders Lianne secretly thinks so much more admirable than the King's Own and who've protected her as one of their own before. Red means her mother's tiny triumphant smile every time Lianne declares it's her favourite colour, because no matter how much Thayet loves Jon she can't help but feel a little secret victory every time one of her children says or does something that is less Conté, more K'miri, and red is not a Conté colour.

So Lianne wears red dresses, red skirts, red tunics, breeches, shirts for much of her life. Not necessarily bright red: Lianne likes all kinds of red, the dark shades closer to maroon as well as the more vivid ones. It suits her even better than blue, the colour nearly all seamstresses succumb to the impulse to dress the Contés in- with their dark hair and their pale skin and blue eyes, what could be better?

Red, Lianne declares, her delicate chin tilted defiantly, pink lips set in almost ladylike determination, and the look in her _brown_ eyes (brown, not blue) daring the seamstresses to disagree. They don't.

Often, Lianne runs wild. Although she always turns up on time and prepared for lessons, and pays scrupulous attention during them, her teachers can never be sure that some tiny part of her mind isn't fixed on somewhere else: wide open meadows, hair confined in a loose knot during lessons torn free from hairties and pins, cantering free over the grass without rules or propriety to concern her. Lianne assures them otherwise, but for a long time she's not entirely telling the truth, because some part of her is truly elsewhere, with the wind whipping in her long hair and her lips drawn back from her teeth in a wild smile of exhilaration.

She doesn't start her monthlies till she's thirteen and a half. Her stomach has been griping for the past week- impatiently, she blocks the pain with her Gift, and carries on as normal- but one day, changing out of sweaty, muddy riding clothes into a dress, she finds a dark trace in the middle seam of the dark blue breeches that makes her frown in confusion, not immediately recognises it- then, suspiciously, she takes off her underwear, and yes, there it is: dried blood, red-turning-to-brown, and quite unmistakable.

Shaken, Lianne pulls underwear and breeches mechanically back on again and sits down hard on the floor. The stomach gripes have returned, but she is so distracted she barely notices. She knows all about this, of course; from her medical textbooks and a terse explanation from Kally of blood and strange cloth pads soaked with it, and murmured complaints from other young noble ladies about monthlies and cramps.

This isn't fair. This isn't convenient. This means she's growing up, and damn it, Lianne doesn't _want _to grow up. She doesn't want to become like Kally: a lovely figurehead for the realm. How many people knew Kally was clever, politically aware and kind? Everyone knew she was beautiful.

Lianne gets up and crosses her room to peer into the looking-glass (and she needs to get that fixed: she has grown a lot recently and it's placed too low). She sees a pretty face; good skin, nice lips, beautiful silky dark hair, a gods-sent bone structure. She's not as pretty as Kally, but she's pretty enough to become a figurehead, a symbol of a princess, personality second to the way she looks and dresses- or worse, Lianne thinks with a stab of panic, someone's trophy. Who will Da say she has to marry? Will she have to choose someone, like Kally had to?

The girl wraps her arms around her middle as a particularly sharp stab of pain goes through her insides, reminded that there are more immediate questions at hand and completely forgetting that she could use her Gift to dull the pain of this. She needs to talk to someone, she thinks desperately. She absolutely refuses to go down to the Healers' Wing- too far away, too embarrassing –and Mama isn't in Corus.

Agitated, she leaves her room and looks around, and then has a sudden thought: Shinko. Shinko could help.

She dashes across the round breakfast and sitting-room, onto which all the Conté family's bedrooms open, and hammers on Roald and Shinko's door. Shinko opens it, a tiny frown on her face- and that is showing a lot of emotion, for Shinko.

"Shinko," Lianne says hurriedly, "please, I need your help."

Lianne explains hurriedly to Shinko, who listens quietly and envelops her in a cloud of compassion, calm and all-round niceness, explaining in serene detail the practicalities of what Lianne needs to do and how she can help the stomach cramps, which Shinko tactfully does not note seem to be particularly bad in Lianne's case. New underwear removed from drawers, a cloth pad bound into the seat of the underwear, a cup of soothing tea, and Shinko sends her to change.

Lianne enters her room, and sees the red dress laid out on the bed, and suddenly feels a spike of vicious loathing for the colour. Red doesn't only mean everything it did before now, it means having to grow up and Lianne- Lianne doesn't want to grow up, not one little bit.

She yanks open the wardrobe door and pulls out a blue dress instead. This one is newer than the red one, more fashionably cut, and as Lianne puts it on she thinks savagely that _it's not fair_. Alan doesn't have to grow up, he hasn't even had to start page training. Unlike her, the choice wasn't taken out of his hands by nothing more worthy than simple _biology_. Lianne seizes a brush and hairties, and braids her hair severely back from her face. She looks furious, her eyes almost feverishly bright and her lips pale with anger; altogether, Shinko thinks, her sister-in-law resembles an enraged hawk, but Shinko does not comment. Women's monthlies take them in different ways, some irrationally angry, some teary, some joyful and some craving sweets, and she isn't really surprised that Lianne, for all her self-possession, reacts violently to such a change. She is perhaps a little surprised that Thayet has not explained everything there is to explain about monthlies to Lianne, but it has not escaped her notice that Lianne would have been born around the time that the first Groups of the fledgling Queen's Riders started taking on serious assignments, and perhaps Thayet was very taken up with her personal command and never connected with this awkward middle daughter the way she did with Vania or –so Shinko understands- Kalasin, who Shinko has only met once, briefly.

Lianne curls up in a large chair and sips her second cup of the tea, which isn't making as much of a dent on the pain as she'd like, and doesn't dare to drown the pain with her Gift for fear of doing something wrong or accidentally causing some damage and decides bitterly that red is, perhaps, her least favourite colour ever.

* * *

Lianne doesn't wear anything red or even consider doing so for years, till it comes to her formal Court presentation and she is wallowing slightly desperately in a welter of fabrics and patterns and advice while her mother looks on indulgently, perhaps unaware of Lianne's desperation. This isn't her world, this self-adornment, this exhaustive discussion of colour and cut, facepaint and jewellery. She belongs to books and lessons, the teachers who can't believe they have a pupil like her and doing something worthwhile when she volunteers to heal at the public-funded clinics in the city, where she dresses plainly, answers to the name of Anne and never flinches at the patients who are brought to her, no matter how festering the sore or emaciated the child. It's not that Lianne doesn't like to look pretty, it's not that she doesn't take care with her appearance, it's just that putting this level of thought into it is completely alien, and so are the low-cut styles in fragile flower colours that keep being suggested to her, soft pink and pale peppermint green, faded, winter-sky blue and delicate lilac. She doesn't like these colours, all this frets her, and she only wants to escape to her studies and clever friends and practical work.

Her mother and Vania and Shinko's eyes all rest on her; Lianne feels trapped by their watching eyes, knowing none of them would be so ill at ease in her place. She looks around for a glimpse of truer, brighter colour than these faint materials before her, and lights on a particular colour that seems to offer sanctuary, familiarity: the colour red. Quickly, she turns and moves towards it, as if it will vanish like a mirage offering false hope if she waits, and lifts the material; soft, scarlet velvet, perfect for the winter balls. A small smile curves her lips, and she tucks an errant curl of black hair behind her ear absently. _This would be perfect_, she thinks.

The dressmaker, a woman named Lalasa who has made Lianne's dresses before and seems to have a real gift for it, has come over to see which colour has caught the customer's interest when all the others merely made her look a little panicked, like a skittish horse. The three other women join her, looking down at the material in Lianne's hands. It's Vania who catches her sister's eye and says: "Lianne, I don't think that colour suits you so well any more."

There is perfect silence. Lianne stares into her sister's honest blue eyes. And then she looks down at the velvet, and smoothes it gently with one hand, then holds it out to Vania. "You're right, Nia," she says, her voice steady as she can make it, and then-

"I think this might be better," Shinko says, quite calmly, as if unconscious of the unexplained tension in the room, and picks up a sample of amber satin and offers it to Lianne, who takes it, a tiny frown on her face, and turns it over and over in her hands, feeling the texture of the cloth. She likes the colour. It's warm and bright, but not too bright. As a colour, Lianne thinks, it shines, it doesn't flare. It feels no need to be showy.

Vania plucks it out of Lianne's hands and holds it up to her face. Lianne stays quite still, but raises one eyebrow at her sister, who blithely ignores her as the three royal ladies and the dressmaker eye the contrast of fabric and skin. _What are you playing at?_ the eyebrow asks, but gets no answer. "Oh, yes," Vania says firmly. "Perfect. That picks up the colour of your eyes beautifully. You have lovely eyes, have I ever mentioned? The amber side of hazel. Shinko-neesan, you're _amazing_."

Her confident little sister hands her back the scrap of material and kisses Shinko on the cheek in decided approval. Shinko smiles, pleased, and slowly a smile grows on Lianne's face, too. Amber, yes, not red. Some fires don't burn as fast and bright as others, but that doesn't mean they aren't just as strong. "Thank you," she whispers to Shinko, and Shinko's smile widens.

"That is a good colour, your highness," the dressmaker says. She sounds pleased for Lianne, pleased that Lianne has made a decision (and everyone can tell that, even though Lianne hasn't voiced it). "Unorthodox, but it suits you so much better than the others, if I may say so."

Lianne smiles at her as well. "Do you know something, Mistress Lalasa? I think so too."


End file.
